MODERNITY AND GOD-TALK

The great temptation of the modern world is to live as if God did not exist—etsi Deus non daretur, in the oft-repeated Latin phrase. Henri de Lubac was convinced that the reason fascism took control of French Catholic hearts and minds in the years leading up to the Second World War was that people had become accustomed to living etsi Deus non daretur. Philip Sherrard accused the modern scientific mindset of The Rape of Man and Nature—again, the outcome of a prideful insistence on living etsi Deus non daretur. The title of his recently-published book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, suggests that Paul Kingsnorth is animated by a similar concern. Secular modernity operates on the assumption that we are answerable only to ourselves. The urge to dismiss God upstairs is deeply engrained in the mindset of the contemporary West.

Many factors help explain why modern man lives as if God did not exist. Some are techno logical: The acceleration of mastery over nature during the modern era can create the illusion that we are the ones in charge, not God. Some factors are cultural: Many took the eighteenth-century ideal of “enlightenment” as justification to cast off religious authority. But there are theological reasons that have led, paradoxically, to the eclipse of theology. One key cause of our penchant for living etsi Deus non daretur is the simplicity of God—or the way we have come to view it. Our theological traditions in the West have made God so remote and inaccessible that belief in him and worship of him feel incongruous: We may affirm doctrine, but experiential life through fellowship with God is lacking.

Let me state upfront that I do believe that God is simple. Any Christian theology true to biblical revelation must refuse the notion of God as the sum total of many parts. A god made up of multiple parts is akin to the mythological divinities of the Greek and Roman pantheons or the idols worshiped by the nations surrounding ancient Israel. These celestial beings were devised after the image of man. Their worshipers could pin them down and make them part of their conceptions of reality because these gods had strengths, foibles, and adventures in time and in space—much like us. The many and various deities were infinitely superior beings perhaps, but beings all the same. Made up of parts, they lacked transcendence and were subject to the grasp and gaze of human comprehension.

To say that God is simple is to acknowledge that he is beyond our ken. God does not have parts that we can describe or analyze. We cannot say that God is part this and part that. He is not even the sum of all qualities, powers, and attributes that we might deem worthy of honor. True, God is every one of those qualities, but he is also utterly beyond them. The simplicity of God forces us, therefore, to turn our eyes away from him: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). We must confess that God is simple, for this confession is an acknowledgement of the otherness of God.

Modernity’s problems are nonetheless tied up with the simplicity of God. Again, don’t get me wrong: We need simplicity, and we need transcendence. But in a certain understanding of God as simple, we end up with a God who is not just simple and transcendent, but also beyond all human contact: Transcendence without immanence. If God is only purely simple, how can we relate to him? How can we see and know him? Does prayer make sense with such a conception of simplicity? A purely simple God would seem forever far away. It is because God stoops down and takes on shape and form and multiplicity that transcendence and immanence go hand in hand. Simplicity, wrongly viewed, does little to promote the life of Christian piety and may tempt us, instead, to live etsi Deus non daretur.

Andrew Radde-Gallwitz pinpoints the theological problem in his book Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Transformation of Divine Simplicity. He refers to what he calls the “identity thesis”: the claim that all of God’s attributes are identical to each other and to the divine essence. From our human point of view, so the thesis goes, we may distinguish numerous characteristics or attributes in God—wisdom, justice, kindness, and so on. But that is merely our perspective; in God himself, they are one, as demanded by the notion of divine simplicity. Hence, the identity thesis claims that all of these attributes are identical both to each other and to God’s essence: God is his wisdom, justice, kindness, and so on—in his very essence. St. Augustine understood divine simplicity through the lens of the identity thesis, and most Western theologians, including Thomas Aquinas, adopted his perspective.

The upshot is a gap between the simplicity of God and the multiplicity of creation, and that gap is hard to bridge. The identity thesis separates a purely simple God from the multiplicity of created things, the one from the many. Such separation does pay dividends: We won’t be tempted to confuse the creator with the creature; we won’t lapse into idolatry or pantheism. But the cost outweighs the benefits. The modern conception of reality excludes God from everyday concerns, and we end up living etsi Deus non daretur.

Ironically, this same perspective yields a view of the eschaton, the final consummation of all things, that threatens to collapse the difference between creator and creature. This view holds that we will one day see the face of God, interpreted as his very essence. Aquinas’s insistence that, in the hereafter, we will see the essence of God—his understanding of the beatific vision—is remarkable for its boldness. Aquinas comes close to suggesting that creatures will comprehend the creator. To be sure, he tempers this claim by acknowledging that we will comprehend God only in the sense of “attaining” to him—Aquinas using the Latin term attingere (ST I, q. 12, a. 7). Whereas God seems remote, transcendent, and perhaps unreachable in this vale of tears, God in the hereafter overcomes the gap in a way that has made many question whether Aquinas still properly distinguishes the creator from the creature.

Perhaps this criticism is unduly harsh. After all, Aquinas suggested that it is by means of a created habit—the so-called light of glory—that we will see God’s essence. In his own way, Aquinas attempts to keep creator and creature distinct, even when we attain to the promised happiness of God. We may perhaps suggest, therefore, that Eastern and Western theologians have different theological toolkits for one and the same purpose: to articulate the divinizing union with God without collapsing the divine and human natures into one. An irenic reading of Aquinas is by no means without warrant.

The Angelic Doctor nonetheless runs into problems, it seems to me. To begin with, it is not clear that distinguishing attaining from comprehending really works. With the identity thesis, God’s essence and his attributes are one and the same. So, we either attain to and comprehend this simple essence, or we do neither, for God’s essence is not spatially mapped out. Traveling south from America, we may at some point say that we have arrived at or attained to Mexico without comprehending it, but we cannot say the same regarding God conceived of in terms of absolute simplicity.

There is a further problem: Aquinas’s commitment to the identity thesis renders his theology of the beatific vision insufficiently Christological, for in his view it is not Christ but the essence of God we will see in the hereafter. True, Aquinas maintained that by virtue of our union with Christ, we will, as it were, be in him as the place from which we gaze upon the essence of God. But it remains the case for Aquinas that it is the undivided essence of God—rather than the theophany of God in Jesus Christ—that will be the object of the beatific vision. This account unfortunately implies a separation between the triune persons and the divine essence. It seems that a too-rigorous monotheism, guarded by the identity thesis, threatens to overwhelm our creedal commitment to a triune God.

What is the solution? We should think of simplicity not as identity of essence and attributes but as a matter of degree. The identity thesis ends up separating a simple, transcendent God from our everyday world of multiplicity. Simplicity in degrees allows all that exists within the hierarchy of being to participate in God’s simplicity, angels much more marvelously than kingfishers or glasswing butterflies, but all to some degree, in accord with their capacity. In this view, everything has a place within the divine hierarchy and thus participates in God’s simplicity in its own unique and limited way. We need hierarchy, therefore, to make sense of divine simplicity and its graded shape.

The third-century Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus made the case for a hierarchy of being that proceeds downward from the One (to hen), by way of Intellect (nous), to Soul (psychē), and so to the sensible world of matter. His Enneads describe the One as utterly aloof from each of the levels of the hierarchy—absolutely simple—while at the same time the One reaches out to Intellect and makes itself wholly present to it. Plotinus, in this way, acknowledged divine transcendence and immanence at the same time.

Plotinus’s hierarchy was a major amplification of Plato’s philosophy of the forms. Plato’s approach had understood particular realities that win our aesthetic admiration as instances or embodiments of the eternal idea or form of beauty, and geometrical proof as an instance or embodiment of truth itself. In this way, Plato allowed that something perfect and thus simple—truth containing only itself, and never error—lends its perfection to complex and imperfect particular things, which in turn participate in a simple and perfect form.

Though Plato had spoken of the Good or the One as, say, a “super-form,” he had not yet sys tematically developed the hierarchal structuring we encounter in Plotinus. Plotinus thought of the One as “beyond being” (hyperousios), which remains forever out of reach. The second level, that of Intellect or being, is where Plato would have located his ideas or forms. For the ancients, being meant intelligibility and vice versa, and thus it is here, at the level of Intellect, that the human mind grasps the forms or essences (ousiai) of things.

The distinction between the One and Intellect—between beyond being and being—is, in one sense, absolute. Human language cannot in any way describe the One. Its simplicity and transcendence are complete and uncompromising. Neither positive (kataphatic) nor negative (apophatic) discourse can grasp or comprehend the One. Plotinus, so it would seem, was stuck with the same sharp separation between simplicity and multiplicity that bedeviled the identity thesis of the West.

Plotinus, however, relied on Plato’s notion of participation. He insisted that the One—despite being utterly simple and transcendent—nonetheless makes itself wholly present within the various levels of the hierarchy. Plotinus explained this perhaps counterintuitive proposal by means of his famous doctrine of double activity. The One’s internal activity or energy (energeia) is its very essence, completely simple, out of reach and therefore beyond being. However, the One also possesses an external energy by which the One reaches out to Intellect. This external energy of the One becomes, in turn, Intellect’s internal energy. And Intellect, too, has an external energy, with which it reaches out below itself to Soul, and so on, down the ladder. The doctrine of double activity allowed Plotinus to claim that each level of the hierarchy of being transcends that which is below, while at the same time being present or immanent within it.

Eastern theology has generally adopted Plotinus’s hierarchical scheme. In this theological tradition, the divine essence (ousia) is out of reach, radically simple, incomprehensible. Creatures can participate, however, to varying degrees, in God’s being, life, and wisdom, which are denominated as divine “energies.” Without too much difficulty, we can map this essence–energies distinction onto Plotinus’s distinction between the One and Intellect. Essence and energies do not divide God into parts, for the energies are still God himself, just as in Plotinus the One makes itself present as Intellect by way of its external energies.

Those of us trained in the theological traditions of Western Christianity are unfamiliar with the essence–energies distinction. We may find it perplexing, even suspicious. Are we to suppose that God has two parts, one characterized by essence, and the other by energies? But questions of this sort merely presuppose the identity thesis as the only way to affirm the metaphysical concept of simplicity, rather than engaging the very different metaphysical concepts that operate in the theological traditions of Eastern Christianity. And note well: If Plotinus’s double activity doctrine seems suspect, think for a moment of the Trinity. Just as God can be both one and three at the same time, so the essence–energies distinction need not contradict the oneness of God—divine simplicity.

In short, for the West, God’s essence and attributes (or, in Plotinian terms, the One and Intellect) are one and the same, so that God’s essence is his attributes, and each of his attributes is identical to every other one. The East, while not rejecting divine simplicity, views it as manifesting degrees. The multiplicity of created being participates in the simplicity of God. As a result, God makes himself wholly present to kingfishers and to glasswing butterflies—though the peculiar multiplicity of their creaturely being limits their capacity to receive the divine energies of God. They share in God’s being and life, though as non-rational beings they lack creaturely wisdom.

I have struggled with the question of how to conceive of God’s transcendence. In my 2018 book Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition, I discussed the beatific vision without recourse to the essence–energies distinction. I expressed sympathy with what the East tries to do with this distinction, but I worried (unduly perhaps) that such a distinction could not maintain the simplicity of God. Trying to steer between the Scylla of the Eastern essence–energies distinction and the Charybdis of the Western identification of essence and attributes, I advocated a theophanic understanding of the beatific vision in which Christ is the essence of God. Jesus, after all, said to Philip, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). My solution took from the East the conviction that our beatific vision will be a Christological theophany and from the West the notion that we will see the divine essence.

I am no longer convinced that my Christological interpretation of the divine essence will do. Steering between the Eastern and Western viewpoints may seem like an attractive option, but it won’t work. I have come to accept that we need the essence–energies distinction. In other words, we should pattern our theology according to the Eastern appropriation of Plotinus rather than follow the Western revision of his hierarchical scheme.

It is easy to think that I am preoccupied with technical issues, the ethereal matters of speculative theology. After all, my thinking on the matter itself has not changed all that much. I still hold that when we participate in God’s energies, we participate in God himself. And I still believe that when we see Christ, we also see the Father. (I surely should make the latter claim, since its wording is straight from John’s Gospel!) But it is less than helpful to use the language of divine essence when we speak of Jesus Christ.

Why? To begin with, talking about Christ as the essence of God overlooks the fact that the incarnate Christ is a sacrament of God (the Ursakrament, to be sure, the ground of all sacramentality). A sacrament effects that which it signifies, which is to say that it “makes real,” here and now, that toward which it points. As sacrament of God, Christ is truly God. But this is not the same as saying that once we have seen him, we have seen and know the essence of God. After all, even as we participate in Christ’s divinized humanity, paradigmatically by receiving his body and blood in the Eucharist, God remains infinitely beyond us. Maximus the Confessor reminds us, “As much as He became comprehensible through the fact of His birth, by so much more do we now know Him to be incomprehensible precisely because of that birth” ( Ambigua 5.5). When we identify Christ with the divine essence, we run the danger of reducing the nature of God to the observable facts of the historical Jesus.

Moreover, essence language is hard-edged. It does not allow for more or less. In the past, I have identified Christ with the divine essence in my theological writing, going on to say that we participate in varying degrees of intensity in the divine essence, just as we may share more or less in Christ’s humility (or some other of Christ’s virtues). But this is to use the language of essence in a highly unusual way. For Aristotle, the essence underlies (to hypokeimenon) an object’s accidental attributes; it is what remains once we have stripped away every one of its attributes. Plotinus held to a similar view: The One’s essence is precisely what distinguishes its transcendent nature from each of the hierarchical levels below it. Only by using the term essence in an idiosyncratic manner can we say that we make progress in it or learn to participate in it more deeply. Only when the transcendent God reveals himself by way of his energies can we reasonably speak of creaturely participation: Only when God manifests himself can we participate in him.

Think of it this way: Either we see God in his essence, or we don’t. There is no conceptual room for greater or lesser. But we can easily speak (and we often do) of gaining deeper insight into God’s revelation, or of growing in discipleship. What conception of the divine allows us to speak of drawing “closer” to God, of growing in holiness as God himself is holy? I have become convinced that we cannot give a satisfactory answer to this question without something akin to the Eastern concept of divine energies.

Casting one’s lot with the essence–energies distinction is a major theological step. After all, this distinction lies at the root of most other differences between East and West. It is precisely the lack of a distinction between essence and energies that made Aquinas shy away from speaking of participation in God: While acknowledging participation in creaturely common being (esse commune), Aquinas was afraid to use the language of participation in God himself (esse ipsum subsistens), because it would mean participation in the divine essence, which in turn would erase the difference between creator and creature. Aquinas rightly recognized that his adoption of the identity thesis required him to avoid the traditional language of participation in God. Aquinas’s view of divine simplicity, the standard view for much of the Western theological tradition, thus seriously attenuated the participatory link between creator and creature.

Absolute divine simplicity, along the lines of the identity thesis, has encouraged the perception of a radical separation between God and the cosmos. Modernity was the inevitable corollary. I fear that we have all become very modern, even if we are baptized believers, for when we think of what creation is, we are inclined to keep any thought of God at bay. By contrast, patristic theologians—Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor—unapologetically assert that creation is not just “out of nothing” (ek tou mē) but also “out of God” (ek theou). Created things, Dionysius says, are “in a sense, projected out from him.” The Logos, suggests St. Maximus, “thickens,” “expands,” or “embodies” himself in creation. Such articulations are possible because these theologians believe that the utterly simple God paradoxically renders himself present in creation.

We may well be startled, perhaps troubled, by such language. The reason is probably that we fear pantheism. This same fear is what animated Western theologians since the High Middle Ages, when they articulated the identity thesis and began to separate nature from the supernatural ever more sharply. But fear is a poor counselor. Pantheism is by no means the inevitable result of letting go of the simplicity of God as understood by the identity thesis. None of the Eastern Fathers I have mentioned held to such a view of divine simplicity; yet none of them lapsed into pantheism. Instead, they typically distinguished between God’s essence and his energies. Creation is “out of God” only with respect to his energies. God’s essence remains completely simple and unambiguously transcendent.

The danger in the modern West is not pantheism but practical atheism. Craig Gay rightly diagnosed the trouble with modernity in the title of his 1998 book The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It Is Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist. Our impediment to a deeper and fuller faith is our disenchanted world, which has emerged in part because we have removed our utterly simple God—whose substance is identical to his attributes—from the material world of multiplicity. The everyday is merely everyday. We pursue social, political, and economic aspirations without regard for God. Is this surprising? It is hard to imagine that the purely simple God of the identity thesis could in any way be present in or concern himself with the world in which we live.

We need to retrieve the Eastern notion of participation in the divine energies. This theological concept allows us to echo the traditional Christian Platonist vision of God’s theophanic manifestation of himself in a created mode and embodiment of himself in creation—a vision, therefore, of creaturely participation in God. To counter the modern, Western creator–creature divide, we must rethink the metaphysical discourse we use in speaking about God and return to the Christian Platonist understanding in which all things are in God and God is in all things.

Christian panentheism, disciplined by a subtle appropriation of the hierarchical scheme developed by Plotinus, was common among the Eastern Fathers. It was their way of avoiding a sharp and unbridgeable separation of nature from the supernatural, of heaven from earth. When we think of creation as God’s making himself present by means of his energies, living etsi Deus non daretur begins to seem a most peculiar undertaking.

---

Originally published at First Things.